Goldwin Smith Quotes

That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain.

The Romans, we are told, were by nature a peculiarly warlike race.

Rome was great in arms, in government, in law.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna, the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there on the surface.

Roman history was kind of unavoidable where I was growing up. It was everywhere - all the place names and ruins and forts. My dad's a history buff, and I spent a lot of time on Hadrian's Wall. I became fascinated by the idea of what was so terrifying up there that the Romans built a 60-mile long, 30ft high stone wall to keep it out?

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.

The reason the Romans built their great paved highways was because they had such inconvenient footwear.

If it was in the interest of Rome to extend her conquests towards the East, and to enter on the inheritance of Alexander the Great there in all its extent, the circumstances were never more favourable for doing so than in the year 716.

We were all Romans once, I guess.

Of the territory which the Romans won in war from their neighbors, a part they sold, and a part they made common land, and assigned it for occupation to the poor and indignant among the citizens…

Romulus Whitaker, the father of our City descended from heaven at dawn this morning and appeared to me. In awe and reverence I stood before him, praying for permission to look upon his face without sin. "Go", he said, "and tell the Romans that by heaven's will my Rome shall be capital of the world. Let them learn to be soldiers. Let them know, and teach their children, that no power on earth can stand against Roman arms". Having spoken these words, he was taken up again into the sky.

Eternal Rome

I know not why any one but a school boy in his declamation would whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they were rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves and of one another.

Rome alone can resist Rome.

Religion Caesar never knew Thy posterity shall sway, Where his eagles never flew, None as invincible as they.

The Roman jurisprudence has the longest known history of any set of human institutions.

About the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, the Etruscan power had reached its height.

There was living in the palace at this time a brother of the great Germanicus, and consequently an uncle of the late emperor, whose name was Claudius Caesar.

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians.

I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.